iwpoe wrote:

A couple is real, but when I say "a couple wants to buy a house" I am using a loose metaphor to mean that Bob and Sally both want or some one of them wants while the other at least participates. I do not mean that the couple, as such, has a desire as separable from the desires of its members.

But if a couple, by your logic, cannot want to buy a house, then it cannot want to get married either, and thus marriage is a metaphor in the worst nominalist sense - ignorable, non-existent. So, please, how can you ask for an inherent value of something like that? If your logic were consistent, the question should not even arise. 

iwpoe wrote:

The couple, as such, may have properties not reducible to the properties of its members, [...]

And the properties that are not reducible are....? I'm listening. (The relevant point is, of course, whether your list of such irreducible properties can be related to marriage.)

iwpoe wrote:

Because marraiges exist, but the members act. My question about marriages inherant value with respect to you is one about reproduction, since you seem to rest your case there.

And what is reproduction to you? Do you acknowledge that it's an act? Or does it merely exist without any action? Or does it neither act or exist? Is it individual or is it an act of a couple? To me it's the last mentioned thing, self-evidently. To question this is rather convoluted.

iwpoe wrote:

It's your theme.

 
No. It's your theme. You asked about some "inherent" or "intrinsic" value. I answered survival. Somehow this is not "inherent" to you, as if societies were not born, living and dying.

This is the weirdest discussion I have had in a long while. It takes a very special kind of person to think that society could just vanish and it would not matter, because society has no will, no life, nothing.

Family is the nucleus of society. Family is born, grows, and may die too. Society is extension of family. It all revolves around reproduction. If reproduction matters to society, then society will sanctify family by instituting marriage. This is not a theory, but what you see in every country in the world. The meaning of marriage is the same everywhere in the world.

A historical note. Ancient Greece is said to have been very gay-friendly. Every male was supposed to go through a half-compulsory homoerotic phase in their lives. But somehow it never occurred to them to demand "gay rights" or "equal rights to marriage".

Last edited by seigneur (8/06/2015 4:04 am)

seigneur wrote:

And what is reproduction to you?

An act of two substances that brings about a third.

seigneur wrote:

Do you acknowledge that it's an act?

Clearly.

seigneur wrote:

Or does it merely exist without any action?

No, not in any particular case, though reproduction, as such, as a Form of action, is not itself in temporal motion.

seigneur wrote:

Or does it neither act or exist?

No.

seigneur wrote:

Is it individual or is it an act of a couple?

It is an act of two individuals who are usually part of a couple, but it is not an act of a couple, as such. That would make no sense. It would be as if when I say 'I ate some chips.' I was saying 'I eat chipness, itself as such.' But it does not belong to chipness, as such, that it might be eaten. What I mean is that I'm eating some members of chipness.

seigneur wrote:

To me it's the last mentioned thing, self-evidently.

Then you would have to explain how 1 thing has the charecter of acting *as* 2 things without actually being plural- unless you deny that mother *and* father both act in reproduction.

seigneur wrote:

No. It's your theme. You asked about some "inherent" or "intrinsic" value. I answered survival.

Right. But no one's survival is threated if they don't reproduce. In fact, I will die whether or not I have 0 or 20 children. You alleged that society itself is threatened, and thus has an obligation to keep itself going (as I would were my life avoidably in jepardy), and I answer that this is merely a metaphor: imporperly importing a personal charecter onto something that isn't personal. It's akin to an athropomorphization, though the thing in question does, at least, have a kind of human charecter.

Indeed, even if it were true and "society" as such had an imparitive to act society *couldn't* since society as such isn't any particular person. What would it even mean for society, as such, to take care of its own needs? Does it contact the congress itself and ask them to pass laws on its behalf? But it can't do so since that would, at the least, require that it have a concrete place of its own from which it acts and even to the extent a society is substance-like it is sufficiently amorphous to preclude its acting as an agent. Adding to the difficulty "society" possesses no will, memory, or dilberative power of its own, so is entirely dependant upon others to initiate purposive activity with respect to it.

seigneur wrote:

Somehow this is not "inherent" to you, as if societies were not born, living and dying.

Sure, I'll just grant you the language. But then I'll say that 'Also rivers and lakes are born (come into being) live (abide in being) and die (pass away).' But rivers and lakes do not have an existential imparitive to continue to be because they are not agents, as individual men are. So too with society as such.

seigneur wrote:

This is the weirdest discussion I have had in a long while. It takes a very special kind of person to think that society could just vanish and it would not matter, because society has no will, no life, nothing.

Sir, your memory must be really very poor, since I neither claimed that it wouldn't matter in any respect nor that society isn't anything in any respect. Either that or you are falling into this hyperbolic fallacy that seems to occur to you at different points in this conversation, wherein you reason: 'If he claims that A is not X in some respect then he means that A is not X in any respect.'

seigneur wrote:

Family is the nucleus of society.

Sure.

seigneur wrote:

Family is born, grows, and may die too.

Sure.

seigneur wrote:

Society is extension of family.

Sure.

seigneur wrote:

It all revolves around reproduction.

'Revolves' is too strong, but sure I'll grant you that.

seigneur wrote:

If reproduction matters to society, then society will sanctify family by instituting marriage.

Okay, maybe you'll see my objection if I put it this way:

*Who* is society? To what person 'named' society does it matter that society lives and dies? It may matter to other persons, but who is themsleves in immediate peril of non-existence by the death of society?

I'm not trying to claim that it doesn't matter to society as such that society lives and dies because society doesn't exist. Rather, I'm claiming that it doesn't matter to society that society lives and dies just as it doesn't matter to a river that a river lives and dies becuase society as such has none of the personal psychological apparati that make something like 'this matters to me' or 'this is inherantly valuable to me' possible. In other words: 'society' isn't a person. Rather, it's constituted by persons.

seigneur wrote:

This is not a theory, but what you see in every country in the world. The meaning of marriage is the same everywhere in the world.

No no, I don't deny that, but the question was why ought that be done. That eveyone does it is evidence of something, sure, but we are in a situation wherein that's no longer evident, and I want to get us to a point where the good of marriage is evident. All you provided me with was a reproductive good, which seems not only not inherantly good to anyone who might want to marry, but which simply is not compelling as a personal reson to stress traditional marriage. It's a purely instrumental duty you would give to society, which they might obey, but which won't fix the malaise that obscures from marriage a general joy at this time.

You would replace with duty what properly belongs to spirit. My question is how to rekindle the spirit, not how to get by after it has fallen into torpor.

seigneur wrote:

A historical note. Ancient Greece is said to have been very gay-friendly. Every male was supposed to go through a half-compulsory homoerotic phase in their lives. But somehow it never occurred to them to demand "gay rights" or "equal rights to marriage".

This isn't quite accurate, and the Greeks themselves view marriage as a kind of necessary evil, but what's your point? 

Last edited by iwpoe (8/06/2015 11:54 am)

seigneur,
 
Could you give us a brief account of what you consider a society to be - by this I mean what type of being you consider it to be in a categorical sense?
 
I would hold that the term 'society' is a short-hand way of referring to the myriad of Relations, some real and some conventional, which hold between the various individual moral agents which make it up. People have specific duties based on their relations to other people above and beyond their normal moral duties towards other persons, however in the end it’s only people i.e. moral agents who engage in moral acts.

iwpoe wrote:

Thank you. This is helpful. I actually have a weaker position even than this because of my Hegelian sympathies: I'm willing to concede that those things may be substances or substance-like rather than merely relations. All I'm claiming is that despite being formed by way of human beings the society, etc. should not be expected to have all the properties of its formative substances..

Maybe you could say that a society is an epiphenomenal entity which has reality above its members but is dependent on them and has no causal powers of its own.
 

DanielCC wrote:

Even if Marriage referred to no categorical item, universal or otherwise, if it had merely conventional 'existence', then it wouldn't follow that it had no value, only that its value was reducible to the joint value of the real properties out of which it was constructed. For instance a game has no categorical existence - there is no property corresponding to the word 'Game' - but it can still have value in as much the capacities which are exercised within e.g. logical thinking, imagination do.

So, whatever value it has, its value is reducible, i.e. it has no intrinsic value. This is what I mean when I say iwpoe's question should not have arised.

His demands to me to state an intrinsic value of marriage to him are unjustified. His own presuppositions block any such possibility. In the ordinary world, survival is as intrinsic as it gets.

 

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Is it individual or is it an act of a couple?

It is an act of two individuals who are usually part of a couple, but it is not an act of a couple, as such. That would make no sense. It would be as if when I say 'I ate some chips.' I was saying 'I eat chipness, itself as such.'

I don't see the analogy at all. What is "chipness"?* And I don't see how you can bring yourself to say that reproduction - which in human species cannot occur by any other means that by a couple, or by a sperm and ovum (two things, male and female) - "would make no sense" when it's an act of a couple.

I tell you that what you are saying is plain nonsense. Reproduction is irreducibly an act of a couple. It is contrary to biological fact to reduce it to the individual level. And this is so self-evident that I should not have to say it.

* This is one of the reasons why I am not Aristotelian. He saw those "-ness" things where they make no sense and he built his metaphysics of forms on it. "Chairness"? No, thanks.

iwpoe wrote:

Sure, I'll just grant you the language. But then I'll say that 'Also rivers and lakes are born (come into being) live (abide in being) and die (pass away).'

Thanks for granting this. It is the vital point.

iwpoe wrote:

But rivers and lakes do not have an existential imparitive to continue to be because they are not agents, as individual men are.

So, to you there's no intrinsic quality to them and your question about the intrinsic value of marriage was insincere. If you really granted me the above point, you would see how from my point of view reproduction is life itself to society, just as it is to the human species.

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Family is the nucleus of society.

Sure.

seigneur wrote:

Family is born, grows, and may die too.

Sure.

seigneur wrote:

Society is extension of family.

Sure.

seigneur wrote:

It all revolves around reproduction.

'Revolves' is too strong, but sure I'll grant you that.

Thanks for all this, even though you are not quite sincere in this.

iwpoe wrote:

Rather, I'm claiming that it doesn't matter to society that society lives and dies just as it doesn't matter to a river that a river lives and dies becuase society as such has none of the personal psychological apparati that make something like 'this matters to me' or 'this is inherantly valuable to me' possible. In other words: 'society' isn't a person. Rather, it's constituted by persons.

Look, sexual reproduction is not a person. And it's not also "constituted by persons" in the atomic sense. If reproduction were constituted by persons in the atomic sense, it would fail to explain how a third person is born from it. Thus reproduction is either "something more" than just two persons coming together or, more emphatically, a third thing where two persons must participate.

Society is similarly not only the sum of the people. If it were, it would indeed not matter if the individual had other people around him and what kind of people the other people were. But it matters a lot, so what was above called Relations are at least as strong as Things. Things are not primary to Relations in any sense. 

DanielCC wrote:

seigneur,   Could you give us a brief account of what you consider a society to be - by
this I mean what type of being you consider it to be in a categorical sense? I would hold that the
term 'society' is a short-hand way of referring to the myriad of Relations, some real and some
conventional, which hold between the various individual moral agents which make it up. People have
specific duties based on their relations to other people above and beyond their normal moral duties
towards other persons, however in the end it’s only people i.e. moral agents who engage in moral acts.

So, above I hopefully explained the irreducibility of sexual reproduction. You can call the sexual act a Relation - I'll grant you that - but my claim is that the Relation is not secondary to any Thing, but can be viewed as either some third Thing or even a proper Thing by itself whose subdivisions or aspects are the individuals who are involved in it.

It's a biological fact that sexual reproduction is irreducible to the individual level. Similarly, society is a collective psychological fact, not reducible to the individual level. That's why society behaves the way it behaves "as if" it had will etc. except that it's undeniable that it *really* has will etc. and we cannot ignore it. Any individual can conceivably refrain from reproducing and refrain from subjecting himself to any other manifestation of the collective will, but it should be clear that this is an act of will opposing another will. If instinct to reproduce and other social engagements were not real, then you should have no need to exercise your own will to refrain from them, yet you must, so therefore they are a real force with their own willpower, and this other willpower is much stronger than most individuals.

Thus, society has its own separate life above and beyond individual concerns, and there's a logic by which it takes care of itself. Sociology is an extension of psychology.

Last edited by seigneur (8/08/2015 1:39 am)